Raspberry Pi: Making it slimmer

by Finn Espen Gundersen on September 6th, 2013

The Raspberry Pi is a versatile and cheap piece of gear. While neat, it has pieces protruding from every side and as it turns out, this made it just slightly too wide for the enclosure I had in mind. No biggie, we can slim it down a bit.

The parts bothering us the most are the RCA connector, the audio jack and the SD-card. This being 2013, we are not going to miss neither the RCA nor the old-school audio.

Pinching the RCA connector to apply a slight pull, whilst applying a soldering iron to each of the three pads several times in a circular order, gives the desired result.

The audio jack has 5 soldered pads, one in the front and four in the back. The finger pull was not enough and I ended up fastening it to a vise and pulling slightly on the PCB.

Voila! Look at that surprised face below the RCA plug.

The next step is the SD card. We can easily get that flush with the edge as well, either by using a custom made micro SD adapter, such as this one, or by using our kitchen scissors. Reddit user divapprove gave me the tip that modern cards are mostly plastic anyway. As it turns out the electronics is all in the top few millimeteres. By snipping away a few millimeteres at a time we can safely adjust the length of the SD card to make it flush with the edge.

All in all this reduces the footprint of a full enclosure for the Raspberry Pi from 111 x 64 (71cm²) to 98 x 56 mm (55cm²).

About

This is an incoherent and mostly uninteresting collection of posts on a variety of topics. Generally these are small guides aimed at helping others save some time, and making sure I'm not forgetting how I fixed something.

I'm a software developer and manager in the daytime and tinkerer in the evenings. I love technology and making stuff.